British families that go on these BBC save money shows can't be real

[Rufusgy]

Eat well for less.

A mum sends three children to school with shop bought microwaved pancakes laced with nuttela everyday

They spend 5 mins explaining how to use a bit of left over chicken in a stir fry, basically just chop up eveything and stir fry it. As if stir fry and woks are some newfangled invention

They can't afford a house deposit and have zero savings, but won't even consider not buying a brand

Slicing chease is 'too much work"

Seriously is any British family actually like this? Who the fuck is stupid enough that they need a prime time BBC show to tell them proccessed food is expensive and its cheaper to make it yourself.

That it should be 2oz or 4oz 00100001? because I was responding to Clutterbugsmum and you've already contradicted her.

Cooking from scratch is often cheaper but not always. The bigger your family and the more storage/freezer space you have, the cheaper it is. I am a huge advocate of cooking from scratch but even I will admit there are certain circumstances where not only is it not worth it but it's actually much more expensive.

But that is because some people don't have an extensively stocked larder of herbs, spices and basic ingredients such as flour, dried pulses, soy sauce etc.

If people committed to buying a few larder items to start them off and adding to it month on month then pretty quickly they'd find that cooking from scratch wasn't so daunting or so expensive.

This is what Delia says (re casseroles):

I find that 6-8 oz (175-225 g) of meat per person is needed if someone has a large appetite, like my husband. For a normal appetite 6 oz (175 g) per person is usually adequate.

www.deliaonline.com/how-to-cook/meat/the-principles-of-casserole-cookery.html

I also agree with Bogey that it's a leap of faith to try something untried and untested if it's costing you quite a lot of money to do it. A confident cook with plenty of experience will read a recipe and instinctively know whether it sounds like something that will work, and if it doesn't, the failed effort can be turned into something else and still eaten.

Someone with little disposable income and little cooking experience is less likely to take that leap of faith.

the health advice is not unanimous. the "traditional" low fat high carb advice is heavily influenced by mistaken beliefs about dietary fat and body fat, and commercial lobbies.

Globally, if you examine traditional ways of eating, there seem to be absolutely thousands of radically different ways of eating healthily. It seems practically the only culture that prescribes a poor diet through choice is late western neoliberal capitalism

I really don't get why people are so proud of themselves about the fact that they "cook from scratch." It isn't difficult and it doesn't necessarily save much money. It is just more time consuming. I mostly have to cook from scratch due to a food allergy but I would love to buy and eat ready made meals from Waitrose etc.

Spoken to my mum and she says it was always 2oz in her family and that came from my grandma, mum was born in 1948. So I guess my grandma was a young mum during rationing, it probably just stuck.

I was raised believing that was a good portion so I guess your upbringing and families food beliefs and habits stick. I love cooking but it wasn't taught it was just around me.

Obi as I was reading this I was remembering how my gran and her brothers and sisters (born in the 20s so children and teenagers during the war) where Notorious for their massive portions. A family party would involve whole salmons, buckets or jellied eels- 2 of 3 suet puddings would be made to feed 4 and plates were piled high.

There isn't and never had been a "set" portion size. People have their own ways of doing things

Funny my dads side were like that but they were farmers, huge buffets and generous portions. I'm not saying it as 2oz is a set portion size but something that stuck for her and then my mum.

I think I'm trying to say how you eat and see food depends on lots of things not just income or your ability to cook. Many things influence us, it must be the same for food.

I think that cooking from scratch is just fashionable right now.

Back in the late 70s and 80s my Mum reliably informs me that it was terribly fashionable to use a lot of convenience foods among her and her naice friends, with their luxury shag pile carpets and tall glass jars filled with dried pasta in the kitchen.

Cooking and eating normal food is how mankind has always eaten. It is pre cooked stuff full of additives and junk which is the weird awful way of eating.

Add message | Report | Message poster Marynary Mon 14-Sep-15 19:57:07
I really don't get why people are so proud of themselves about the fact that they "cook from scratch." It isn't difficult and it doesn't necessarily save much money. It is just more time consuming. I mostly have to cook from scratch due to a food allergy but I would love to buy and eat ready made meals from Waitrose etc.

I cook from scratch because I don't work and have little else to do, it is not something I am overly proud of. However I do get a little glow when everyone is sat together and clearly enjoying what I have made. I love to cook.

We have the odd ready meal although I rarely find ones we like. We are also a large family and therefore ready meals are too expensive and become as fiddly. I did try buying convenience foods from the store that markets itself as quality convenience food - either "Cook" or "Eat" or something like that and they were awful and very expensive. My family are not fussy eaters they turned their noses up at them.

Some while back after a disagreement with DW about whether we were eating enough meat I looked up various national guidelines. 80g for an adult was typical. Interestingly it was about 140g for the US and 60g for Greece.

On that basis I will cook a batch of bolognaise sauce using 1kg beef mince and 200g bacon. It will make 5 lots of 2 adult and 2 child serves, ie, 60g per person overall. There is also egg in the spaghetti, so no one is going short of protein.

2 weeks ago I bought a 2.5kg leg of lamb and made 3 x lots of lamb rogan josh and 5 x some Moroccan lamb tagine thing, ie, 32 servings off the leg. There are some pulses and nuts in the tagine. No one is complaining of anemia yet.

I've also got a kilogram of rump steak in the freezer. Something for the weekend.

I bought pre-grated carrot in Tesco today. Actually, it was carrot spaghetti but it only needed chopping up before adding to a soup base. I only bought it because all the loose carrots were tiny and spindly but this could become a regular thing

140g = nearly 5 oz which is over a quarter pound - surely a quarter pounder was originally named because it was boasting of being such an unusually large amount of meat?

60g = a little over the 2oz a previous poster mentioned

what are these guidelines toadinthehole? are they recommended per meal for health? per day? or just sort of... socially accepted amounts?

Unfortunately I can't find them now. I used to have a pdf on my computer, but it's gone. It was a mixture of NZ Ministry of Health guidelines plus some stuff published by the World Health Organisation. My recollection is that they were the recommended amount for the main meal of the day.

Tesco Everyday Value Frozen Cheese and Tomato Pizza is 60p. If you use decent cheese, decent tomato paste and reasonable flour etc you will have trouble matching that.

Yes, but then you are comparing apples to oranges aren't you?

A decent quality ready made pizza (Pizza Express brand for example) can set you back the best part of a fiver. If you fed a family of four on five with older, bigger DC on those it would be a very expensive ready meal. You could make a comparable quality, exceptionally good pizza from scratch for much, much less.

I think the problem now is that we have become so aspirational about food that we expect (and think we deserve) complex recipes and fantastic variety every night of the week. My cupboards and fridges are bursting with every kind of pot, jar and bottle of cooking ingredient under the sun because I like to cook and I like to be able to make anything I want at the drop of a hat without having to trawl the shops for sun dried tomatoes or harissa or tahini or whatever, first. But it has undoubtedly costs me hundred and hundreds of pounds each year to be able to do that, on top of the basic meat/veg and everyday ingredients that I would buy anyway. So much of this stuff gets opened, a few dollops used for a specific recipe and then stuck back in the fridge/cupboard for years months and it often doesn't get used before it spoils because I rarely cook the same thing with enough frequency to use it all up.

That's okay, I can afford it. But if I were on a low income I would have to think very carefully about which ingredients I prioritised and I'd have to commit to eating stuff with harissa or tahini or whatever on a bit of a loop until it was gone. Yet we are encouraged/inspired by aspirational cooking programmes to eat differently night in, night out.

Listening the the self-style nutritonal expert on Steve Wright's show yesterday talking about what should be in our children's packed lunches for example??seriously, so many kids have two full time working parents now and these 'experts' want us to fanny around making homemade oatcakes and healthy muffins and hummus and grating veg into wraps, and doing things with avocados?

If we ever had packed lunches it was a jam or a cheese sandwich and an apple, and bag of crisps if we were lucky.

Years ago everything was cooked from scratch because there was no alternative, and in many parts of the world that is still very much the case, but the food is/was very simple and very repetitious. Meat is/was a precious commodity that is/was only served occasionally or eeked out and served with big quantities of veg, pulses, grains, potatoes etc.

Tesco Everyday Value Frozen Cheese and Tomato Pizza is 60p. If you use decent cheese, decent tomato paste and reasonable flour etc you will have trouble matching that.

But Value pizza won't have decent cheese, tomato paste and flour, will it?

We make our own pizza, on occasion we've even squished and reduced our own tomatoes.

Compared to buying takeaway pizzas it was very cheap.

The taste was similar to premium shop bought pizzas and no doubt the ingredients were higher quality.

It took approximately 3 hours.

Takes 10 mins to shove a pizza in the oven.

It's a fun thing to do with the kids, we do it often, but not on school nights and not when I have to work the weekend.

sod taking 3 hours to make pizza!!

We use the greek yogut mix - and then the whole thing takes maybe 25 minutes MAX including cooking time.

It's one of the contradiction's of Mumsnet that when threads relate to most traditional parts of 'wifework' such as housework or childcare are concerned most people are heavily in favour of paying someone else to do it. But as soon as it comes to cooking anybody who doesn't slave over a hot stove every night is totally judged.

Incidentally, there is a family in my street where the mother is housebound and not really capable of doing cooking because of health problems and there's no Dad around. Me and other neighbours drive the kids to do their shopping and give them tea sometimes. There's absolutely no way you could feed them more cheaply from scratch than they're fed from the processed stuff they buy. Value frozen pizzas, oven chips, tinned beans. They cost literally pennies per serving. It's not ideal but they're not starving and they are healthy.

We make our own pizza, including the base maybe once every 2 weeks. It takes half an hour, not 3 hours. Maybe you need more practice ;)

A kitchen robot does help though for making the base

It can take hours, but that is only to prove the dough.
We often have a pizza on a Sunday evening ( OH makes them with the kids)
They make the dough and tomato sauce early in the day, then leave the dough in the airing cupboard all day to prove- with the occasional punching down.

The ready-meal-cook-from-scratch argument is being presented as a bit polarised here. TBH if I cook from scratch it takes about 20 minutes or so, and I use things that cook easily with minimal prep. So for example I might put some chicken thighs or a bit of frozen white fish in the oven to roast while I boil some new potatoes and broccoli. If I make a pizza from scratch (which is rare) I would get the bread machine working on the dough, roll it out into my biggest roasting tray, and then spread some ready made passata on the base and get the kids to grate some random cheese from the fridge on top, adding a bit of ham if they fancy it, then stick it back in the oven for a bit. A quicker way to do a pizza base is to halve baguettes down their entire length, chop in half and then add the toppings of choice before grilling briefly, which how my (working) mum used to do it when we wanted a treat. This is all quite firmly in the nutritionally sound camp for family meals, particularly if you add to it the quite extraordinary amounts of salad my mum encouraged us to eat as kids (she is German so it's normal to eat a lot of salad there). So basically cooking does not have to be wifework or time consuming if you apply a bit of practicality to the equation.

I put all this on my blog. All of the stuff I have put on my menu plans involve roughly 20 minutes of actual effort. Life is too short to stuff a mushroom.

Dinner for the home

It was the dough that took the time, but the DC like making proper themselves, so shortcuts wouldn't cut it for them.